


Imago Dei

by giddytf2



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Abortion, BAMF Derek, BAMF Scott, BAMF Stiles, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Bottom Derek, Bottom Derek Hale, Bottom Stiles Stilinski, Canon Divergence after 3x24, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Time, Future Fic, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Magic, Manipulation, Mindfuck, Mpreg, Nightmares, Oblivious Derek, Oblivious Stiles, PTSD, Pack Dynamics, Pack Feels, Panic Attacks, Psychological Trauma, Slow Build, Slow Build Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Top Derek Hale, Top Stiles Stilinski, Traumatized Derek, Whump, dubcon elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-05 19:52:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1830190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giddytf2/pseuds/giddytf2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years in the future, one of the most brutal serial killers in recent American history is blooming in Beacon Hills' bosom. Stiles, Scott, the Sheriff and the rest of the pack race against time to find and capture the serial killer, while Derek is changed in ways he'd never imagined and falls into an abyss from which only one man can save and free him.</p><p>(Or, a slow-build, dark, violent, full-of-badassmuthafuckers, with-a-dash-of-fluff Derek/Stiles future-fic if the NBC Hannibal team got their hands on Teen Wolf instead of MTV and had no restrictions on the sex, violence and death.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by [this prompt](http://tnw-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/4905.html?thread=900393#t900393) on the Teen Wolf Kink Meme. Do note, though, that this is _not_ a rewrite of ohmyjetsabel's Tiny Houses. I've yet to read that story and I'm just interpreting the prompt details and incorporating whatever I can of them into the story, so to the anon who posted that prompt, I apologize if my story turns out to not be what you wanted. I've also added as many relevant tags/triggers as I can think of for now, but I'll add more as I go along (or if readers let me know). This story is also canon-compliant up to episode 3x24 and set ten years in the future from that point; in fact, the Derek/Stiles dream scene at the very end is pivotal to some events in the story.
> 
> I wasn't kidding about this story being as if the NBC Hannibal team got their hands on Teen Wolf; if the violence / gore / visual nightmares of that TV show triggers you, then this story most certainly will. Please read at your discretion. The story will be updated fast and regularly! And before you ask, nope, the major character who dies is _not_ Derek or Stiles.
> 
> The poetry excerpts at the beginning of each part are from various poems by Sylvia Plath. The overall soundtrack for this story is from the NBC Hannibal OST - [Wendigo Quintet](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUQ66MetmSU). A truly haunting, surreal song.

\+ + +

My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.

I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

 + + +

  

It begins in the shadows, like everything else in his life is wont to do. A flicker of orange, white and red, licking at her bony ankles just above her tan leather, strappy heels, coiling up her bare shins into fiery snakes ravenous for the cold blood in her veins.

“How do you feel today, Derek?”

This is what she always asks him, what _they_ always ask him, every single one of them. He no longer answers. He’d tried to, at first, he really did for Laura’s sake. His third psychiatrist – who’d lasted a mere five minutes – hadn’t appreciated his reply. The old bastard had screeched like a mortally wounded fawn when Derek lunged at him and crushed him onto the polished, wooden floor of his consultation room, human teeth flaunted and lethal enough, stark eyes so close to blazing Beta blue and bright.

He’d reined in his fangs and claws, of course. Only those of his kind will welcome them. He’s _angry_ , not suicidal. Not yet.

“I want to help you. I really do.”

He sits as still and silent as a storm-hewn boulder in a dark green therapy chair in the dimness of her vast, curtained consultation room. He stares at the fire eating her pale flesh. He decides he’s not going to look at her face today. Certainly not at her long, flowing blonde hair. He wants to tear it off her scalp. Torch it and cram it into her mouth and make her gag on it until she’s ash, meaningless ash.

He can still hear her laughter. Still feel the clamp of her thighs around his hips, her clenching heat choking him, scorching him.

He can still hear her laughter as she smiled at him and told him how she’d masturbated amidst the trees while she listened to his family incinerate to death.

“But healing can only begin when _you_ want to be helped.”

He’d run so fast from her, through the Preserve, falling and getting up and falling. He’d seen the pillar of black smoke raging up into a revoltingly blue, clear sky. He’d heard the scrape of desperate claws upon shattered glass, upon the invisible, indestructible wall of mountain ash, and when he was near enough, he’d heard the screaming from their mouths, from his mouth.

The skin and flesh had liquefied off his hand when he grabbed the knob of the front door. He’d burned. Burned with them. That’s what nobody gets, not even Laura. He’d burned with them, and never stopped.

“Your sister informed me that you had another panic attack three days ago. Do you want to talk about it?”

He’s a sprawling desert, flat and arid, a blinding graveyard of skeletons and blood and angels. With each passing year, another stratum of sand is laid to rest upon the remains of his mother and father and siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts. With each passing year, another layer of stone is laid to rest upon the smooth walls of his face, entombing its furor in airless darkness.

He is rock. He is untouchable. He will embrace the flames and imprison them and they cannot touch him.

He watches them lick up more pale flesh, up and across a knee-length, black pencil skirt and then up and around a svelte torso in a pale teal blazer and white, high-neck blouse. He wonders what she looks like under her skin. He wonders if the fire will melt it away like she tries to do with her winter-cool questions and strings of words to the walls of his face and mind.

He wonders what it’ll feel like to rip her throat out with his teeth, to gulp mouthfuls of her meat and blood and watch more of it spout from her corpse until he’s bathed in it.

He vibrates with the force of the vision. It’s a glorious vision, one he wishes to keep and return to over and over. One day, he’ll find her and kill her just like that, and bury her bones in a desolate chasm in his desert where she’ll never hurt anyone else again.

“I think it’s time to make a choice.”

The flames have engulfed her whole head and hair now. She’s a scarecrow being razed by orange-and-red crows, and he stares at her and wants to laugh. She isn’t doing much of a job of pulling him apart if she’s being pulled apart by the very beasts she’s supposed to scare away.

It’s a good thing, then, that she can’t see the beast in him. It’s hungry. So hungry for her blood, for retribution.

“You can give up. Roll over, lay down and die.”

A trail of fire snakes across the carpeted floor between them to his feet. It slithers onto his boots, setting them alight. He almost smiles at the sight. Foolish, little thing, trying to claim him as well when there’s nothing left of him to claim.

“Or you can fight. Move on with your life and start anew.”

He doesn’t feel any pain as the flames lick up his legs and arms and consume his chair. It appears a fatal assault, but he doesn’t feel anything and it doesn’t bother him.

It doesn’t.

“Which will it be, Derek?”

He stares on and on at her head of fire, at the vision of him sinking his fangs into her neck, her carotid artery and ripping it open, of him howling at the moon with teeth and eyes of red.

He is a desert. He is stone, he is rock. He is untouchable.

He burns and he is already dead, and so he says nothing at all.


	2. Chapter 2

\+ + +

What large eyes the dead have!

I am intimate with a hairy spirit.

Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

 + + +

  

He learns on a chilly, foggy morning in Beacon Hills that his psychiatrist, the very last one he’d consulted when he still lived in New York City, had passed away from lung cancer several weeks ago. He doesn’t quite remember how he came across her obituary online, only that her name had caught his eye and he’d clicked on the article to find himself face to face with her again, gazing at her grayed, short hair and creased, fuller face in her photo portrait. It must have been taken before the cancer, before it ate her and left her as skin and bones and patches of hair.

In another universe, one in which his family hadn’t burned to death and he had never been acquainted with the psychotic, thankfully now very dead Kate Argent, he might have met her and learned to navigate the meandering mazes in his head in brilliant light instead of pitch-black shadows. He might have befriended her, having never associated long, blonde hair and arctic-cold voices with loss and death.

Friends are a rare commodity in his reality. Even those bound to him by his Bite would leave, sooner or later. Or die.

She’d been a lovely woman within and without, upon reflection. She’d gazed beyond the fangs in the words he’d allowed to slip from his lips, gazed beyond the beast in him and seen the man he would become, but he’d understood this too late. He could never look at her without seeing Kate.

 _Dissociation_ , Stiles would say, if Stiles ever knew about the psychiatric therapy Laura had forced him to attend for years. _You were dissociating yourself from her and by extension, Kate, by imagining her going up in flames. That way, you couldn’t see her face and hair. You couldn’t see her._

It still troubles him on occasion, almost fifteen years since his first session with her, that seeing her on fire had kept him saner than seeing her as a person.

She may have gazed beyond the beast in him, but it’s there, lurking in the dark side of the moon. It always will be.

On the same morning just before dawn, he thinks about her as he gets out of his car – a sixth-generation ruby-red Camaro – and walks past looming, gnarled trees to the yellow crime scene tape winding around other trees in an expansive circle and waits for Sheriff Stilinski’s acknowledgement of him. He thinks about Stiles, who he can hear driving towards this area of the Preserve in that astonishingly resilient, blue jeep from a mile away. He thinks about how she and Stiles might have run into each other at some point in New York City, talking shop over forensic psychology or long-term care for PTSD sufferers or various treatments for victims of violent crimes. The last one is Derek’s favorite, if it being a favorite means clawing his own throat to gory shreds is an enjoyed pastime.

He always ends up thinking about death.

Death, following him everywhere he goes.

“Who’s the victim?” he hears Sheriff Stilinski ask Danny, better known among his police peers as Deputy Māhealani. Danny’s worked for the Sheriff for over five years, much to the pleasant surprise of practically everyone.

 _Thought he’d go into IT_ , Stiles had said to Derek when they were hanging out in Stiles’ Brooklyn apartment three years ago. _I mean, he did have that criminal record for computer hacking when he was thirteen but he did say the charges were dropped and he’s still damn good with computers. Guess you really never know how people can turn out, sometimes._

Derek glances past Sheriff Stilinski and Danny at the horrific, gruesome tableau being illuminated by halogen work lights behind them and he thinks, yeah, sometimes nobody knows how anything can turn out. And maybe, like for that damned soul dangling from sturdy ropes and steel hooks in rotting flesh, it’s for the best.

“Shawn Thomas, twenty-seven,” Danny says, declaring the name and age of the damned soul. “Assistant manager at an Albertsons about twenty minutes from here.”

Derek sees the flash of emotion in the Sheriff’s hazel eyes, so swift and minuscule that it’s gone before he can blink. The Sheriff’s had decades of practice at wearing an impassive face in public view, one that rivals his own. The man can easily fool the media with it, including the most voracious of tabloid journalists; he’s seen it in action numerous times on television and in person. Derek, however, is no tabloid journalist, no stranger, no ordinary human. He’s been friends with the Sheriff’s son for over a dozen years, close friends for the past seven.

Stiles will be twenty-eight this year. This fact isn’t lost on Derek either.

Sheriff Stilinski sees him and waves him in. He lifts the crime scene tape and steps under and past it. No one stops him or glances at him as investigators continue to process the scene in head-to-toe coveralls, gloves and masks. It’s not the first time the Sheriff’s requested his presence at a murder scene. It won’t be the last, if it’s the same killer of the previous two victims.

Another vicious murderer is blooming in Beacon Hills’ bosom, and it isn’t a werewolf. That much he and Scott are certain. As the Alpha of Beacon Hills, of ancient Hale and Argent territory, it’s one of Scott’s obligations to record and track all werewolves in it.

Since the Two-Month War that’d exploded between Scott’s pack and the Walker pack from Oregon six years ago, no werewolf in America has ever dared enter their territory without explicit, traditional approval from Scott first. Word had spread like wildfire of what Scott, Derek and Isaac had done to Sebastian Walker and his rabid Betas for blatantly trespassing and attempting to kill Stiles and the Sheriff. Justified as the three of them were in their actions, Isaac had confessed to him that he’d had nightmares for weeks of Scott in his ultimate Alpha form slaughtering the Walkers in the lunacy of a full moon.

Derek had nightmares of it too. Nightmares of how much he’d reveled in the carnage, in the shrieks of agony, the splitting of flesh, the crunching of bone and sinew and erupting fountains of blood, howling at the night sky his relief at Stiles being safe, _safe_.

He’d been just as relieved to later find a near-naked, grimy Scott hunched in a corner of his study in the rebuilt Hale house, weeping soundlessly from bloodshot human eyes into trembling human hands.

 _Never again_ , Scott had rasped to him, lucid and remorseful, recalling everything he’d done to the Walkers after a week of being feral.

He’s yet to tell anyone else about it. It’s in the best interests of the pack that other packs fear Scott like they do now. It’s in the best interests of those packs to fear Scott like they do now. And for the past three months, since before the serial killings started, there have been no werewolves in town other than those already in Scott’s pack. Namely, him and Scott; Isaac is in Evanston, Illinois for a two years-long MBA course, thousands of miles away from the sick fucker who’s preying on the young people of Beacon Hills.

Thank the Mother of Wolves for that, at least.

“Sheriff,” Derek says in greeting when he’s standing face to face with him. There are bleak, heavy bags beneath the weary, uniformed man’s eyes. His light brown-and-gray hair is lank. His dark brown jacket and khaki button down shirt are rumpled and the six-point gold star pinned to the jacket’s left breast seems lackluster and toy-like. He smells like he hasn’t had the chance to shower in days and munched on granola bars and drunk gallons of black, caffeinated coffee and little else.

Derek tries not to grimace, even if it is in commiseration. Stiles isn’t going to be pleased with the Sheriff’s drastic dietary shift from salads, vegetarian meals and decaffeinated coffee in moderation.

“Deputy,” he says to Danny, who nods and looks at him with brown eyes far too sprightly at this forsaken hour. He’s a goddamn werewolf but more and more often he feels he can’t compete with Danny’s seemingly perpetual vigilance and vivacity. Maybe he’s just getting old.

“Derek,” Danny replies, eyes twinkling for an instant, and Derek just _knows_ that he’d been tempted to call him Miguel. Again. It’s a time-honored in-joke between them (and Stiles) that he actually doesn’t mind. Not that he’s going to let them know anytime soon.

Miguel, his alter-ego who’d existed for minutes in Stiles’ childhood bedroom to beguile the openly gay Danny into tracing a phone message for Stiles. Miguel, who’d played along with Stiles’ ruse and stripped and then donned Stiles’ ill-fitting shirts to Danny’s not-so-subtle delight.

Amusingly, Stiles still hasn’t thought to ask him why he went along with it at all, twelve years on. Or in retrospect, for whom the display of his skin and muscle had really been.

What _would_ Stiles do, if he knew that Derek is bisexual and crazy, madly, hopelessly in love with _him_?

String him up on hooks and ropes, perhaps. Or worse, laugh in incredulity and then tell him with a sincere, apologetic smile that he’s straight as a railroad spike and just not into other men.

He’ll take the hooks and ropes, thanks.

“I told you, call me John,” the Sheriff says, patting him once on his upper arm. “Thanks for coming. Ungodly hour, I know.”

“Yeah, no god here,” Danny mutters as he glances behind at what’s left of Shawn Thomas, his brown eyes aimed somewhere at the body’s bare, deformed feet.

Neither Derek or Sheriff Stilinski disagree with him.

The Sheriff gazes at the body also and says in an old, worn voice, “Looks like we officially have our first serial killer.”

The two eyes Danny has are still looking away, but if Danny had a thousand more, they would all be honed on Derek. He can feel them through his leather jacket and grey Henley, their stare sharp as the sword Stiles had swung to hack off Kate’s hands in Mexico.

“Officially,” Danny says, and now he looks at Derek with those two visible eyes, unflinching. Derek looks back, the rigid stone walls of his face firmly in place.

Danny’s known about the supernatural and the presence of werewolves in Beacon Hills for many years now. He’d even briefly dated one of the werewolves in the Alpha pack that invaded Beacon Hills a decade ago. After the Two-Month War, Stiles had insisted on letting Danny into the pack to be another of its valued human members alongside Stiles, the Sheriff and Mrs. McCall. (Lydia, being a banshee, doesn’t count as a human, and she likes it that way.)

 _Everybody likes Danny_ , Stiles had said to him and Scott while they sat at his hospital bedside and were encouraged to doodle on the bone-white cast around Stiles’ left forearm courtesy of Sebastian Walker. _I trust him with Dad’s life. That bullet was meant for Dad and he threw himself in front of it when he didn’t have a fucking bulletproof vest on. That should tell you something, right?_

Derek breaks the eye contact and glances at Danny’s good-as-new right shoulder, where that bullet had pierced clean through from back to front. When he glances back up at Danny’s face, he sees the gleam in Danny’s eyes, and he permits one end of his lips to quirk up for a second.

“Officially,” he also says, thinking about the blood staining his hands, staining Scott’s and Isaac’s. Even Danny’s. Even the Sheriff’s.

Even Stiles’, except Stiles hasn’t killed anyone.

Derek intends to make sure it stays that way.

“Yeah. All kinds of killers in this world,” Danny says, quieter, looking between him and the Sheriff. “Some kill to protect the ones they love, when they have no other choice. And then,” Danny gestures at the corpse with a scowl, “there are sickos who do things like _this_.”

Derek reminds himself to buy Danny a drink at The Jungle, if Danny’s up for it some time.

The Sheriff is saying something in reply to Danny, but Derek can’t hear it. He can’t hear anything other than that heartbeat he’s known for so long, for what feels like forever. That familiar, steady heartbeat, throbbing in tandem with his own in a pale, mole-spotted, lean body that’s roamed the valleys of his dreams for as long. It drowns out the harsh sounds, sights and smells of the world. It subdues the ruinous flames fuming across the desert in him. It carves the name of its master in the fragile rock of his face.

Stiles is parking his jeep next to his Camaro. Stiles is here.

He listens to Stiles’ heartbeat, to Stiles amble across leaf-laden ground to the taped-off crime scene, to Stiles mumble about obstinate, overprotective fathers and nice, cooperative deputies and never eating cold fried chicken for breakfast again. This time, he has to fight the quirking of his lips.

He knows the precise moment Stiles appears in line of Sheriff Stilinski’s vision from the Sheriff groaning and slapping one hand over scrunched-shut eyes.

“Oh, for the love of – Stiles! What are you doing here! How’d you even know where to –”

Derek sucks in his lower lip as the Sheriff glares at Danny who’s pasted on a rather convincing expression of innocence.

“Uhm. Sir, I think I see you-know-who from The Criminal Examiner,” Danny says, pointing in the direction of the yellow crime scene tape behind Stiles. “I … better go and deal with her before other vultures come. Yeah.”

The Sheriff’s glare follows Danny as the deputy sheriff darts away and past an unsurprisingly annoyed-looking Stiles. What does surprise Derek is the intensity of the warmth that surges up from deep inside him upon seeing Stiles, a whirlwind of gladness and tension and _desire_ , so much of it that it punches him in the gut and robs him of his breath and thoughts. Jesus, he just saw Stiles the day before at the Stilinski house. Less than forty-eight hours ago.

And it feels like a millennium.

He’s got it so bad, and Stiles isn’t helping to ease that one bit, looking the way he does like a porcelain-skinned deity from a Botticelli painting come alive. Stiles’ thick and mussed dark brown hair glints like banked fire. His white t-shirt and acid-washed jeans wrap snugly around sinewy torso and legs defined by years of active exercise in New York City gyms and training with the pack whenever he returns for the holidays between semesters at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His open, black trench coat billows behind him like wings coalesced from the whispered confessions of a thousand sinners seeking absolution, and those black spectacles, those damn spectacles perched upon that striking, upturned nose are framing the most beautiful, poignant, doe-like eyes he’s seen and will ever see. They seem to glow amber, lightning-bright in comparison to the weak rays of daybreak.

Derek wishes he could paint as admirably as Botticelli, if only to capture this image of Stiles, this image of a god sauntering a wicked earth unworthy of his attentions, and hang it on a wall in his bedroom for his sole perusal.

Stiles doesn’t seem to notice him despite standing next to him as Stiles confronts his father with a frown and crossed arms over a developed chest. Derek knows that within the sleeves of the trench coat, Stiles’ arms are just as developed, forearms overlaid with soft, dark hair and exquisitely veined.

He’s got it so fucking bad.

“Dinner,” Stiles grits out. Oh, Stiles is _not_ happy.

“Now, son,” the Sheriff begins, holding up one forefinger in the chilly air between them, a wretched warrior who’s no match for Stiles’ divine ire this early in the morning. “I was too busy to eat –”

“Are you telling me you didn’t eat dinner? Did you eat _breakfast_?”

Derek can hear Stiles’ teeth grinding. Stiles’ full, bowed lips are pursed. Stiles’ heartbeat has kicked up a slight notch, and two patches of red have shown up on Stiles’ cheeks. Stiles (and the Sheriff!) will surely strangle him if he thinks aloud about how appealing Stiles looks when he’s livid.

“ _Stiles_ , as you can see, I’m a little _busy_ right now. I can eat something later, so stop worrying about that and didn’t I tell you to _stay put_?”

Stiles sighs heavily and rolls his eyes. He also relaxes a fraction, arms loosening and shoulders slumping.

“Dad, you can't shelter me from this! You can’t expect me to stay at home and do _nothing_ to help you. I'm a qualified criminal psychologist now and –”

“No, you're not _officially_ one –”

“Aw, c'mon, we’ve been through this! I've already been exposed to crime scenes like these, and I _will_ see more when I _officially_ become one –”

“ _That's_ still up for discussion!” the Sheriff interjects, jabbing the air with his forefinger, his eyes wide with indignation. Stiles isn’t affected in the least by it.

Derek, on the other hand, takes a delicate step back. He’d learned the mortifying way to never step between the Stilinski men in a heated argument. He’ll also never look at zucchinis and mayonnaise the same way ever again.

“Dad, I gotta start somewhere –”

“So what, this is a _career boost_ for you? _That's_ what this is about?”

“No, dad! _God_!” Stiles exclaims, flailing his hands about, his eyes even wider than his father’s in exasperation. “I wanna catch this fucker as fast as we can, just like you do!”

“Language!”

“What!” Stiles’ voice rises several octaves higher. “ _That's_ what you care about _now_?!”

Derek is _this_ close to fleeing the scene to ensure his ongoing survival when Stiles abruptly turns and bestows him with a wide, pearly smile. It enthralls him and pins him in place like a defenseless butterfly on paper-covered cork. He finds that he has no yearning to remove the pin in spite of the cavernous hole in him it’ll leave, as it were.

He’s got it bad, so fucking bad that he doesn’t care if Stiles sticks the pin into him again and again, until he’s dead.

“Hey, Big Guy, help my stubborn, overprotective dad see the error of his ways, _please_?”

How fortunate for him, that Stiles is a god on earth who can resurrect him simply with another smile.

“Well …” he says with restraint, stepping forward into a neutral position between Stiles and the Sheriff, a reluctant referee. “Your dad does have a point about you being overly exposed _in person_ to crime scenes like these –”

“Smart man,” the Sheriff says, still glowering at Stiles who glowers back.

“But Stiles is indeed a qualified criminal psychologist who ranked the highest in his undergraduate _and_ graduate classes, and did write a thesis on criminal and crime scene profiling that caught the eye of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime –”

“That's right,” Stiles says, crossing his arms over his chest again and smiling smugly.

“ _But_ as the sheriff of Beacon Hills, he does have the right to remove you from the premises if he deems it necessary –”

“See, I _knew_ you were a smart man –”

“ _However_ , having proven his academic expertise in his discipline and initial fieldwork, it would be an _advantage_ to have Stiles examine the crime scene, increase his field experience, produce a more detailed profile of the killer and possibly find clues that we may otherwise miss.”

Derek has no idea how to respond to Stiles and the Sheriff gaping at him.

“Wow,” Stiles eventually murmurs, deadpan. “I think that's the most words that’s come outta your mouth this _year_ , Derek.”

“Ha. Ha.”

Derek gives Stiles his patented shut-up-Stiles scowl: Lowered eyebrows, narrowed eyes pointed as daggers, lips pressed into a downturned, thin line. He’s long accepted that it’s lost whatever power it ever had on Stiles, though. Stiles just grins back at him and swaggers away while humming a random tune under his breath.

The Sheriff doesn’t even try to stop Stiles.

“You and I are gonna have a _talk_ ,” the Sheriff says to Derek, appearing more fatigued than ever. “And you too!” the Sheriff yells at Danny, who is indeed speaking to a long-haired brunette in a burgundy, double-breasted coat, the yellow crime scene tape bisecting the space between them. She glances at him and the Sheriff every now and then, her blue eyes the blades of a surgeon’s scalpel, ever ready to slice and hack a bloody path into the mind of anyone unlucky enough to become her target for her next big headline, and he ought to know.

Donna Hackler, tabloid journalist and blogger who runs the true-crime website, The Criminal Examiner, had chased him three years ago in the hopes of interviewing him about the fire that killed most of his family. She’d found his house number first, then his mobile phone number when he had her number blocked. When he blocked her from calling his mobile too, she’d resorted to stalking him around Beacon Hills, becoming progressively more difficult to shake off. The last straw was smelling and hearing her sneaking around his house in the middle of the night with a camera in hand.

 _Derek Hale, the prodigal son who returns to a town of ghosts and is immediately arrested for the murder of his last living relative at the time_ , Hackler had said after he threatened to call the police, smiling mirthlessly at him. _I wonder what happened to Laura Hale’s killer, seeing as you’re free and no one else was ever arrested for it. I wonder what happened to the arsonist who set fire to the house that once stood here. Do you think about these murderers, about them walking free and unpunished for their crimes? Do you even care?_

He hadn’t felt the slightest bit sorry about swearing a streak at her and bellowing at her to fuck off and stay away. In the darkness, under the moonlight, she’d looked just like his former and dead girlfriend Jennifer Blake. The Jennifer he thought he knew before he saw her in her true, ghastly darach form.

He didn’t sleep at all that night, his hands and belly tremoring, his eyes seeing only a grotesque visage of deliquesced, hairless skin and decayed teeth grinning back at him.

“Derek?”

He swivels towards the Sheriff and turns his back on Danny and Hackler. He feels hot and cold at the same time. His clammy hands are fists and his fingernails dig into the skin of his palms. He’s itching to release his claws, to let them stab his flesh. Make him bleed. Make him forget.

He hates that there are some ghosts he can never kill, that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Come on, son,” the Sheriff adds, beckoning him to walk with him. That last word, that one word, murmured with the affection of a father, is enough for his claws to remain sheathed, for him to take a deep, slow breath and open his hands at his sides.

Stiles. He needs to see Stiles again.

He and the Sheriff cross inspected and cleared ground side by side towards the dangling corpse of Shawn Thomas. Stiles is circling it within the ring of halogen work lights, scrutinizing it with alert, bold eyes. There is something about Stiles’ confidence – from the stable steps of agile feet in dark blue sneakers to a head held high to the energetic fidgeting of long, graceful fingers in contemplation – that both awes and injects dread in Derek. He is proud, very proud, of Stiles for his various accomplishments and personal growth throughout the years, here in Beacon Hills and in New York City. He is also afraid, very afraid, of Stiles becoming too accustomed to the violence and butchery this world has to offer, of finding out one day that death will be all Stiles will live for.

Death, following Stiles everywhere he goes.

Death, bearing Derek’s face.

“The body’s been frozen but thawed afterwards, just like the other two,” Stiles says, not once taking his eyes off the body. “Hanging it up in a crucifix suspension, that’s something different.”

Derek thinks that Stiles’ succinct description of the body’s pose is apt. The body, naked and eviscerated from collarbones to groin, is suspended two feet above the ground between two trees by ropes fixed to metal hooks in the upper back and arms. The arms are lifted to shoulder height, somewhat bent at the elbows and spread apart as if they’re about to conduct an orchestra. Or attack.

The curved, black claws embedded into the tip of every finger and toe hint to the latter.

“These bite marks aren’t human,” Stiles says, now standing in front of the corpse and examining its left arm. “They look canine. Applied post-mortem. Probably from the same skull attached.”

Derek skims his gaze from the corpse’s neck down to its feet. The ribs have been opened at the sternum. The heart is missing, cleanly removed. There are more bite marks on the shoulders, hips and thighs. He thinks there’s one on the right side of the abdomen, inches away from the yawning, torso-long wound that’s freed coils of intestine to spiral down to the ground in a visceral heap. The placement of the bites is deliberate. Familiar, too familiar.

He hears Danny walk towards them and then stand at his left side, the Sheriff at his right.

“Are those what I think they are?” Sheriff Stilinski asks him, glancing at him with an expressionless face.

Derek looks at the claws again. The beast in him growls in umbrage at the sight of them. They’re pathetic in comparison to those of a werewolf’s, some of them chipped and dull as if they’ve been in storage and neglected. Implanted so _unnaturally_ like they are in place of the human body’s original nails, they are a parody, a mockery of his kind. An insult.

“They’re wolf claws,” Derek says in a low voice, a muscle in his lower jaw bunching when he grits his teeth. “From ordinary wolves.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Do you smell anything _suspicious_?”

Derek sniffs the air, once, twice. As a natural-born werewolf and a master of his sense of smell, he acquires and catalogs hundreds of scents in a matter of seconds. He hastily shoves the stench of the corpse aside, concentrating on just any scents of the supernatural; all supernatural creatures, counting those that can become incorporeal, have a unique scent specific to their species. It’s challenging but not impossible to conceal one’s scent from a werewolf if they know magic.

But magic also has its own scent.

He smells it, just a smidgen of otherworldly ozone lingering in the air.

“Same like before,” he whispers. “The killer’s hiding his scent with magic.”

The Sheriff huffs, then whispers back, “Just my luck I get a serial killer who’s _magical_.”

Derek’s lips twitch.

“It smells like it.”

The Sheriff huffs again but doesn’t say anything else. Danny shifts from foot to foot, quiet, heart beating a little faster. Although Danny is part of the pack, they’ve kept him out of most of their battles and away from the bloodshed. Before the serial killings began, the worst Beacon Hills cops (except the Sheriff, that is) usually had to handle were jaywalkers, litterers and sporadic drunk drivers. Seeing a corpse as mutilated as this, plus the previous two, is something most cops in the country never will in their entire careers. It’s an experience no one deserves, much less good folks like Danny and the Sheriff. And Stiles.

The urge to drag Stiles away from the body almost overwhelms Derek as Stiles moves even nearer to the body to study its exposed innards. The beast in him snarls at the body’s head hanging above Stiles’, at the hideous, intentional juxtaposition of the upper half of Thomas’ brown-haired head on top of a flayed and bleached canine skull staked in place of the body’s original head. The stitched-open, cloudy eyes still in their sockets stare forward, immortalized in a state of madness. The skull’s lower jaw is sagging as if about to deliver a fatal bite like a mindless animal.

A mockery and an insult, without a doubt.

“He was disemboweled with one cut. The heart was removed like a pro,” Stiles says, confirming his earlier observation, calm as ever. “There’s no hesitation in the cuts. The killer very likely has a medical background, or he’s killed so many times that he knows his way around in a human body from practical experience. He’s killed more than three times, that’s for sure. He’s _used_ to it already. The killing … the killing itself is no longer the endgame, the _climax_ for him. Not anymore. Maybe it hasn’t been for a really long time.”

Derek releases a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding when Stiles steps back from the corpse to gaze up at the atrocious amalgam of human and canine heads.

“Huh. Only half the head. With its eyes intact and open.” Stiles tilts his head to one side. “The human with the soul of a beast. Or is it the other way around?”

A shiver zigzags up Derek’s spine. The urge to drag Stiles away returns in full force. But from what, he doesn’t want to ponder on. He may just find the answer too terrifying to behold. Too close to home.

“Has the victim’s lower jaw been found?” Stiles asks the Sheriff.

The Sheriff shakes his head and replies, “No, but the CSIs are still processing the scene.”

“Yeah, well … they won’t find it here. He’s keeping it. It’s his trophy for this kill. You find it, you’ll find the fucker who did this.”

Derek steps forward, hands now in the pockets of his jacket. He needs to be nearer to Stiles. He needs to place himself between Stiles and the madness before the madness claims Stiles for its own. He needs to contain himself, _control_ himself from popping out his claws and slashing them across the stitched-open, mad eyes. They’re staring at him. Damning him. _Seeing_ him.

 _When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you_.

“And the heart?” he asks Stiles, tearing his gaze away from the corpse, from those eyes he will see again in the nightmares to come.

Stiles is staring at those eyes also. Whatever Stiles is seeing, none of them know until Stiles speaks once more.

“He’s not a killer. He’s … an artist. He’s making works of beauty out of the horror and ugliness of the world. He’s giving them _meaning_ , making their disgusting, monstrous existence something a little worthwhile with his hands, his _love_. He draws them out of the shadows, displays them in their total glory for the world to see. To _appreciate_.” Stiles takes another step back, and another, his eyes wide as they maintain contact with that of the corpse’s. “He takes away their hearts because they don’t need it. Because nobody needs it. Especially not _him_.”

Derek stares at the side of Stiles’ face, at his profile. He needs, he needs but he can never have what he wants and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, Stiles may be right.

“So if he’s an artist,” Danny asks from behind them, “his work’s got a _message_ or something, right? What the message of _this_ ‘art piece’?”

Stiles elevates his arms up and to the side, a maestro about to reveal another masterpiece to the masses. His eyes are even wider, ignited by an unsettling spark that raises the hackles of Derek’s beast, that grips Derek’s heart in a vise.

“’Look upon me. See me, fear me. _Hate_ me for the abomination that I am.’”

Derek stares at Stiles, at the abyss cracking open before them, and hears the beast in him roaring in recognition of a kindred spirit.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for not posting this part earlier! I waited until the season 4 premiere aired so I could watch the supposed 'Sterek fanfic-worthy' moment at the very end of the episode. I was hoping to include it in this part, but...it didn't quite live up to my expectations. I did try to write it in anyway, and later felt it better to stick to my original notes for this part of the story. So, things remain canon-compliant only up to 3x24 and then veer off in a rather different direction.
> 
> And if you think Derek's got it bad already? In upcoming parts, shit's about to get _real_.

\+ + +

Your absence is inconspicuous;

Nobody can tell what I lack.

\+ + +

 

Derek is lying on his back on a smooth, flat surface. He’s in a dark room, and he’s not alone. A flicker of light to his left catches his eye. He tries to turn his head to glimpse it, but he can’t move his head. Something flat and razor-sharp is wedged inside his skull under his hairline. A hefty blade, maybe. He feels no pain.

His gaze flits from side to side, then down his body, to his feet. There are more flickers of light there. They glow orange, red and white, like tiny flames. He blinks, and gradually, he realizes that he’s looking at light reflecting off the surfaces of knives lodged into his chest and belly at random intervals. They’ve gone deep into him, through him.

“Oh, Derek, you just have to learn everything the _hard_ way. Don’t you?”

Stiles emerges from the darkness. Stiles stands in front of him and gazes up at him with utterly black eyes and oh, he’s not lying on his back, he’s been pinioned to a wall by a blanket of blades. He’s been crucified.

There’s no god here, either.

“You keep doing that, baby. You need to stop it.”

But Derek’s here. He’s here again, on the wall of his former loft, an offering of crimson rivulets and abundant wounds to the Nogitsune.

“You’re not Stiles,” he snarls, scowling down at the thing that’s wearing Stiles’ face and body. He wants to spit on the thing’s pallid, black-veined skin. It isn’t worthy of wearing Stiles’ face. It’s a parody, a mockery of Stiles. An abomination.

“No,” the Nogitsune says, sounding exactly like Stiles. “But then, was there ever a Stiles?”

Blistering blood trickles down from Derek’s hairline, down between his eyebrows, down the sides of his nose into his mouth. It tastes sweet. It infuses his tongue like Chambord liquor.

He feels no pain whatsoever. Perhaps the Nogitsune pities him this time and has anaesthetized him. Perhaps he’s dying and the pain receptors in his body are no longer functioning. Perhaps he’s dreaming, and Stiles is slumbering beside him, unconscious to this war of illusions and insinuations.

“What if there was never a Stiles, Derek?”

The Nogitsune’s breath is also sweet. It wafts across his lips as the Nogitsune leans forward and grazes the tips of their noses together. It smells like raspberry, honey and vanilla glazing a putrefying animal heart.

He shudders and squeezes his eyes shut as the Nogitsune licks the side of his nose and slurps his blood. The Nogitsune’s tongue is cold and scaly.

He hears a noise like broken bones grating beneath skin. The metallic slide of blades on granite. The buzzing of flies, the hisses of snakes.

“What if there is only _us_?”

He convulses. Gasps and opens his eyes. His fangs and claws are out. He gasps again, then holds his breath for a few seconds before exhaling slowly. He does this another time. He wills his hammering heart to calm down.

He stares up at the cracked, craggy ceiling of a murky cave. His vision is hazy at the edges. He blinks and blinks but it doesn’t clear. The knives are gone. There are holes through his chest and belly and he is bleeding out onto cobwebs, purple flowers and rock, dying, dying.

He hears someone shout his name. He hears the deafening blasts of gunshots. He hears the chilling, wrathful roar of an Alpha werewolf and he coughs wetly and thinks with a faint smile, _finally, you assholes,_ _finally_.

Stiles bursts into view first, wielding what Derek will later be told is an enchanted Mexican Espada Ancha with a machete-style blade and copper spoked guard that once belonged to a 19th-century brujo. It hews the air in broad, unavoidable arcs. A hand clutching a shotgun is sliced off its shrieking owner. Another hand gripping an axe sails through the air. Stiles plows through the horde of hunters with infallible conviction, a furious and untamed Ares exacting his vengeance for Derek’s kidnapping and torture. Lydia, Malia and Kira leap into the fray after him, armored in bulletproof vests and armed with two semi-automatic pistols and a katana respectively. Lydia is wailing. Her shrill cry summons their mightiest warrior to the main arena.

Scott, in his ultimate Alpha form, crashes through a barricade of feeble wood and steel, haloed in blazing sunlight. It is the first time he shifts into this form and he is unstable, his gigantic, humanoid bulk shrinking under the onslaught of more wolfsbane bullets. He takes down half a dozen hunters with one swipe of a clawed hand and another formidable roar. His canine jaws crush to pieces the rifle of a hunter who unwisely attempts to assault him from behind. He will easily take down the others and heal himself with burnt wolfsbane-laced gunpowder later.

When Stiles reaches Kate, shifted as she has into her repulsive were-jaguar form, she is already doomed.

Derek watches the face-off through blurry, half-shut eyes: Kate is scarcely human although still bipedal, her speckled fur coarse and dull, her limbs disproportionate and her joints misshapen, a travesty too shameful to be deemed a shape-shifter. The foulness in her has corrupted her into something even worse than a kanima, something irredeemable. Stiles is poised to charge at Kate with his raised sword, blood anointing his pale face, neck and black ballistic vest. His eyes are so wide that Derek can see the whites around the brown irises. Stiles is baring his teeth, growling, and as drained and damaged as he is, Derek rolls onto his punctured belly and struggles up onto his elbows.

This is the moment he would die for, the moment of witnessing a righteous god vanquish the demon who’d burned him with her touch, burned almost everything he loved to ashes.

“And if your hands cause you to sin –“

He hears Stiles speak as if Stiles’ mouth is against his ear. He sees two flashes of color and light pass each other, so swiftly do Stiles and Kate hurtle towards each other.

“Cut them off and throw them away.”

Stiles and Kate now stand with their backs towards each other, dozens of feet of space between them. A flicker of light reflects off the side of Stiles’ horizontally gripped sword. A line of blood along the blade’s edge gathers into a drop of crimson, then plummets to the sandy cave floor. It ruptures into smaller globules of blood. It curses the ground with each one.

Kate’s altered features are blank as she gapes down at the rings of red that materialize around her forearms, below her elbows. She makes no sound as her lower arms slide off flesh and bone and fall to the ground with a thump. They revert to their human state, furless, ashen and dead. She still makes no sound as blood spurts from her veins and drenches her fur and tattered clothes. She collapses onto her knees.

Stiles stands before her, sword lifted high into the air above his head. His face is pallid and emotionless. His stark eyes glow amber. Ares’ sentence of death will be meted out. The last vestiges of Stiles’ innocence will die with Kate.

Kate will win again.

Derek shouts Stiles’ name. The sword lingers in the air above Stiles’ head. Stiles turns his head and gazes at him, as if seeing him for the first time. He gazes back, his breaths short and blood-wet. Stiles’ eyes are black in the shadows. Fear lurches inside Derek.

_No, don’t do it, please don’t do it. Let me bear the sin. Let me. Let me._

The sword swings down. Away and to the side. Stiles steps back, brown and human eyes on Derek. Derek pushes himself off the ground and he dashes at Kate on all fours and then he’s sinking his fangs into her neck, her carotid artery and ripping it open. Her blood is thick and sweet, sweeter than raspberry, honey and vanilla glazing a fresh, beating human heart. He watches it spout from her throat. He bathes in it. He sees faces and bodies unfurling in its growing lake around his knees. He sees their eyes and mouths open. He sees his own face, contorted like gnarled roots.

He topples onto his side on tainted ground. He is splintered rock. He is a felled tree. Kate is dead and Stiles isn’t, and he is neither dead or alive.

“Where were you? We couldn’t find you before the attack.”

Scott, panting from dwindling agony, in human form again.

“I got lost. Tends to happen when I’m inside dark, creepy caves I’ve never been in before.”

Stiles, his old smart-mouth self again.

“Sorry, Sourwolf. This is gonna hurt.”

Stiles, setting wolfsbane on fire. Stiles, setting him on fire with the merciless press of hands upon his wounds. He screams and writhes and begs Stiles to stop, _stop_. The ground beneath him crumbles away. He falls down a lightless, endless well. He shovels the last handful of Mexican desert sand over Kate’s human, colorless face and buries her forever in a desolate chasm. He falls and falls and falls.

Then, he lands.

He jolts upright, his breaths seesawing in and out of his lungs, his claws popped out but not his fangs. He’s on a bed, naked save for the blanket and comforter bunched on top of his hips and legs. He inhales, holds the air in him for five seconds, then exhales. He does this once more. He has to control his breathing, before it controls him.

He inhales.

He’s in his former loft again, and there is no Nogitsune and no knives or wounds in him and sitting at the foot of the bed with her back to him is Braeden, combing her undulant, black tresses.

Exhales.

Her smooth, dark brown skin shimmers in the morning sunlight cascading through tall windows.

Inhales.

She’s also naked, unreserved and undaunted in his presence.

Exhales.

He’d moved out of the loft almost seven years ago, after he and the pack completed renovations of the Hale house.

Inhales.

He’d broken up with Braeden even earlier. He hasn’t spoken to Braeden in years now.

Exhales.

He wonders if she’s all right, if she’s still alive as he stares at her back. She is here, and yet, not here. He knows this.

He retracts his claws. He raises his right hand into view. He stares at his fingers, all six of them.

Of course. _Of course_.

His lips quirk up in a semblance of a smile. His eyelids flutter shut. His hammering heart calms down, again.

_So tell me. How do you know? How do you know if you’re still dreaming?_

_Your fingers. In your dreams, you have extra fingers._

He feels Stiles’ wrist in his grasp. He feels the warmth emanating from Stiles’ skin, soothing him. He feels Stiles’ eyes upon him, drinking him in, washing away his transgressions.

“My anchor, my mate,” he permits himself to whisper, here in the asylum of memories within dreams, memories within memories.

Of course, even that is just a dream, an unattainable dream. Of course Stiles hadn’t been slumbering beside him. Of course Stiles isn’t here with him. Of course.

“You okay?”

He opens his eyes and watches Braeden continue to comb her hair. He feels like he is a disinterested visitor in a museum observing a modern art installation he’s already seen before. He blinks and she becomes Kate, her long, blonde mane veiling her face from him, veiling her rotten soul that’d prowled the earth and devoured him and spat him out a morsel of himself. He blinks and she becomes Jennifer – no, Julia Baccari, and her long, dark locks slough off with rancid portions of scalp to unmask that face, that vile _face_ that he’d touched and _kissed_ and –

Braeden has his face held between her palms. She waits for him to breathe again, to look at her and _see_ her.

“I’m not them,” she murmurs, her eyes brown and sad and so very human.

“I know,” he rasps, “I know,” but later, after they’re dressed and she kisses him goodbye and departs for her next mercenary job, he throws up everything he ate for breakfast in the confines of his bathroom. When he thinks about the sex he had with her last night, he retches and hates himself for thinking about Kate again, about Julia again, again and again and again.

He fucking hates that there are some ghosts he can never, ever kill, that will haunt his fucked up mind until he loses it.

He fucking hates that his anchor, his _mate_ is the best friend he’s ever had: An impetuous, mischievous, intelligent, witty, ADHD-wrought, _beautiful_ man – and oh, Stiles is a man, he is a _man_ now – who’s with someone else and has no damn clue that he is the center of Derek’s universe. Stiles, the axis upon which the entirety of his being rotates at Stiles’ oblivious mercy.

He doesn’t tell Braeden about any of this. He never tells her.

But maybe, he never had to, for her to know before even he did.

“You knew, didn’t you? From the start,” he says to her, months later.

He stands at the windows, his hands in the side pockets of his jeans. He listens to her bundle away her array of hunting knives into their leather sheaths at the kitchen counter. Her luggage bag is packed and ready to go. He stares outside at the somber skies and sees nothing.

“Hey. We talked about things and we went into this knowing it wasn’t going to last,” she says, sauntering to him and caressing his bristly jawline with her fingers. “Never wanted a ring, and neither did you. And I’m not one to be held down in one place for life.”

He looks into her eyes and he knows that he’s right.

“You knew. And yet …”

“You know I have some precognition ability. It’s not that strong, but sometimes, it’s enough.” She smiles at him. It hurts him to see the fond farewell etched so plainly in the curve of her plump lips. “And yeah, I knew. I knew that I never had a chance for more with you, even if I did want that. Nobody else does, really. Not in any universe in which _he_ exists.”

The sympathy in her eyes hurts even more to see. He shuts his eyes and swallows down a lump in his throat.

“Braeden –“

“Hey. Hey, I got no regrets. I hope you don’t, either.”

He opens his eyes to half-mast. He tries for a small, glad smile and manages it, his eyes crinkling, a sigh leaving through his nose as he bows his head.

“I don’t.”

They kiss for the last time at the open door of the loft. It’s bittersweet, with just the right amounts of bitterness and sweetness for Derek to reminisce about it without any sting.

“You know what pisses me off, though?” she asks, her bag slung over her shoulder as she looks at him for the very last time.

Derek leans back against the door frame, composed, the smile still arching up his lips.

“What?”

Braeden shakes her head and says, “That hyperactive asshole doesn’t know just how good he could have it with you. And he could have it all. With _you_.”

Derek bows his head again, his smile now one of bashfulness. He gently closes the door behind him once she’s gone.

In reality of the days after that, it’d taken Stiles approximately ten days, six hours and forty-eight minutes to find out about the ending of his relationship with Braeden. In this memory within a dream, Derek feels the door close behind him and instantaneously hears his phone ringing from its spot on the bedside table.

He sees Stiles on the screen, smiling at him from a candid photograph he’d snapped of Stiles on his last visit to New York City. The sunset behind Stiles crowns his head and gilds his beloved face with gold.

“I had to hear it from my _dad_ , Derek,” Stiles says through the phone in a very low, cool tone.

Oh, Stiles is not happy in the least, and butterflies swarm in Derek’s belly at the thought that Stiles is upset because he wanted to be the very first to know that Derek’s single again. Available.

“Stiles, I … I didn’t want to talk about it.”

The ache in Stiles’ silence is palpable. Derek hates his tactless brain and mouth for causing it.

“I meant, I haven’t spoken to anyone about it. They just … guessed. Or maybe Braeden told them and I didn’t know.” He shrugs although Stiles can’t see the motion. “Just … wasn’t meant to be.”

Stiles is silent for several more unbearable seconds. Then he murmurs, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s so _you_ ,” and Derek envisions Stiles rolling his eyes and smiling that forbearing smile and he huffs out a brief laugh and sits on the side of the bed, shoulders hunched. He is forgiven. He is undeserving of it but he’ll take whatever he can get from Stiles. Better scraps than nothing.

“Okay … Yeah. Okay. I just … I thought she was _it_ , you know?”

Derek doesn’t know what to say to that, to Stiles faltering at words when Stiles’ mouth can zoom at supersonic speed with them.

“I just thought …” He hears Stiles sigh and pace around. Stiles is probably in his Brooklyn apartment, the windows shut considering the lack of ambient noise. “I don’t know whether to say sorry, or … I don’t know.”

Derek swipes his tongue over a dry lower lip.

_Say that you know me. Say that you love me also._

“Stiles, I’m fine. Really.”

“Okay. That’s good. I’m … I’m glad.” Stiles sucks in an audible, velvety breath that Derek commits to memory straightaway. “I’m here. If you do wanna talk. You know that, right?”

Butterflies, so many butterflies in his belly, his chest at hearing that.

“I know. Thank you.”

Two weeks later, the butterflies inside him will become a flurry of iridescent, winged bliss when he receives a series of messages from Stiles in the middle of the night.

**From: Stiles**

**we’re done. saw it coming long ago.**

**From: Stiles**

**she got her own road to ride. so do i.**

**From: Stiles**

**single on my 21 st. figures.**

It takes five hours to fly from Beacon Hills to New York City but in the span of a blink, he is already at Stiles’ Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment and lounging on a multi-colored, paisley sofa on the apartment’s terrace, a bottle of cold beer in hand. The furniture’s a visual affront to ordinary human eyes, much less to his werewolf ones. But Stiles likes it. So it stays.

Stiles likes him. So he stays and listens to Stiles rant about Malia who became his ex-girlfriend less than twenty-four hours ago.

“Did I tell you? I fucked her on the first day I met her at Eichen House.”

Stiles is standing and leaning against the black steel railing of the terrace, gazing out at the neighborhood’s East River waterfront and Manhattan in the background. Stiles is attired in a black-and-white baseball top and jeans, his hair buzzed to millimeters at the sides while the top is gelled up and wavy. It’s an unforeseen change from the haircut Derek saw on his last visit. He likes it. He hopes the restyling sticks around for a while. He hopes he’ll have the chance to brush his fingers against it, against Stiles’ scalp.

“It’s true. Abso-fucking-lutely true.”

Neither he or Stiles have bothered to switch on the lights yet in spite of the sun setting half an hour ago. Under the city night sky, in the contrasting layers of opaque shadows and vibrant street lights below, Stiles appears an ethereal creature.

That is, until Stiles starts flapping his hands as his voice increases in volume and pitch.

“I _fucked_ her. On the _first day_ I met her. At fucking _Eichen House_! And she turned out to be _your cousin_!” Stiles lets out a peculiar laugh that makes Derek want to seize Stiles’ hands, to shush Stiles with his fingers. His lips. “It just _figures_ , right? My first official relationship, and it just _had_ to be with a Hale. _Peter Hale’s_ kid. Why couldn’t it be –“

Stiles suddenly cuts himself off, sucking in his lips and glancing away. Derek does his damnest to not wince. He rubs at the left side of his chest with the palm of his right hand. Stiles was probably going to mention Lydia, who’d been Stiles’ major crush for over ten years of Stiles’ childhood and then adolescence. Is it really so bad to be associated or involved with a Hale?

“God! What was _wrong_ with me?” A second later, Stiles covers his eyes with one hand and grimaces and holds out the other hand with its palm out. “Rhetorical question! Rhetorical question! _Do not answer the question_.”

Derek snorts, then sips his beer. Yeah, he isn’t interested in chatting about whatever else happened at Eichen House or about the Nogitsune either. Ever. He’d be lying, though, if he says he doesn’t wonder whether Stiles would have jumped into a relationship with Malia if Stiles’ mind hadn’t been messed up and later possessed by the Nogitsune. Stiles has that, at least, as a valid excuse.

What the hell’s _his_ excuse for fucking around with Kate in the first place? Or Julia? Or even Braeden, as much as they’d discussed things before the actual fucking?

“Yeah. Man, I was in a bad place then,” Stiles mutters.

 _You and me both_ , Derek thinks but doesn’t say. He squirms on the cushions in the gloom and tries not to remember steel bars against his arm and back and asking how it’d feel to put Stiles down like a rabid dog. The sheer idea still makes him want to vomit.

“It … it just wasn’t _me_ , you know? _She_ wasn’t in a good place either at the time. If it’d been a different situation, if I hadn’t been so fucked in the head, I would never have touched her.”

Derek gives Stiles a sharp glance of surprise. Stiles seems to interpret it as something else.

“Seriously. Don’t look at me like that. I mean it. Just because I was a teenager then doesn’t mean I wanted to fuck everything in sight, and I resent the implication!”

Derek opens his mouth to protest Stiles’ assumption. At Stiles’ glower, he shuts it and lifts his hands and beer bottle up in placation. Stiles can deny it all he wants, but during the first years of their friendship (and it really was that, he was just an ass who had zero friends and a million trust issues back then), he _always_ smelled arousal radiating off Stiles like dense clouds of fragrance. The good kind of fragrance. The kind of fragrance that made the beast in him whine like a pitiful pup and lust for pale, mole-spotted skin like an animal in the throes of heat.

Derek doesn’t smell that from Stiles anymore, not since Stiles left Beacon Hills for college. He doesn’t know if it’s because Scott taught Stiles to control himself around werewolves, or if Stiles genuinely feels no sexual attraction whatsoever to him after all. It’s a special sort of hell, not knowing which one it is. It isn’t as if he can _ask_.

“Wedding bells, the ‘happily ever after’, the house with a white picket fence …” Stiles snorts. “None of that were in the cards for us. It never was. Hell, no. We never talked about all that, but I didn’t think we were ever gonna reach that point anyway. Shit, I’m not even _twenty-one_ yet, you know? Not for another day. Whatever.” Stiles pauses, then murmurs, “I don’t want any of that anyway.”

Stiles is staring out at the waterfront again, his back turned to Derek. Derek rubs at the left side of his chest once more, at the strange twinge there.

It winks out like a vanishing star when Stiles whispers, “Not with her.”

Derek gives Stiles another sharp glance. Stiles had whispered that so faintly that Derek knows he wasn’t intended to hear it. But he did.

He yearns to ask, _with who, then?_

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to handle the answer, if it isn’t the one he craves to hear.

“What the hell, right. There’ll be others,” Stiles says at a normal volume, monotone. Stiles still has his back turned towards him.

Derek takes another sip of his beer. He inhales long and deep, a breath of courage. Says with a nonchalance he doesn’t quite feel, “Well, until then, here you are. Stuck with a grumpy asshole like me.”

Stiles turns around, quietly, slowly. The awkward, flailing teenager is consumed by the shadows. A young, virile man stands before Derek, as tall as he is, filling out in all the right places. Strong. Assured. Observant.

“And?” Stiles asks, looking him dead in the eye. His voice is low and warm like an afternoon breeze across cool ocean waters teeming with life. With hope.

Derek rests his bottle of beer on his right thigh before he drops it. Its diminishing iciness does little to the fine quavering of his fingers. He stares back at Stiles, at Stiles’ bright, amber eyes. His blood pressure and heart rate skyrockets. He feels giddy, like he’s simultaneously floating above his body and sinking through it into the floor. His breath cages itself in his chest.

He licks his lower lip. Squeezes the bottle in hand. Opens his mouth to say something, _anything_ –

Stiles’ phone chimes from inside his jeans pocket. A death toll to honor the passing of this acute moment.

Stiles shuts his eyes as if he’s been knifed in the back.

“Sorry,” he mutters, waving his left hand while taking out his phone with his right. “I – Sorry.”

Derek isn’t certain why Stiles is apologizing. He isn’t certain how long he’s held his breath until Stiles has his phone in sight, until he has to breathe again and precious oxygen is cycling itself through his lungs. Whatever it is Stiles sees on the screen of his phone lessens the irritation on his visage, though only a bit. Stiles glowers down at the floor as he puts his phone back into his jeans pocket. Not an important message then. Derek clutches his bottle of beer with both hands, the stone walls of his face reconstructed so hastily that he feels like Tiresias, blinded by careless gods for allowing their secrets to escape.

What he would give, right now, for the foresight with which Tiresias was recompensed with by Zeus.

What he would give, to walk the meandering mazes of Stiles’ mind in brilliant light, to know if he will ever be blessed with such opportunity. What he would give, just to know if he has a future at all.

Stiles clears his throat, expression now soft. Sweet. Heart-wrenching.

“You staying?”

Derek needs no clarification from Stiles to answer. He’s startled that Stiles even asked that.

“You may be single on your twenty-first birthday, but you won’t be alone.”

“Yeah?”

Stiles’ unguarded eyes whittle the walls of his face he’d painstakingly built minutes ago. He is powerless to stop it. He doesn’t want to. He’s being bared to the elements, to Stiles’ exploration and he thinks, it would be nice to have someone he _wants_ in his head for once.

“Yeah,” he rasps, staring into Stiles’ bright, amber eyes again. Chasing the lost moment. “I was going to mail you your present the day I flew here. I’ll do that when I go back.”

Stiles’ lips quirk up. Stiles stands at the gateway cleaved through the rock enclosing his mind, a ball of thread in hand. Not the immortal Ares now, but a human Theseus, prepared to set foot into the labyrinth that houses the beast.

“Huh. I thought I was already given it.”

Derek feels a breeze across his face. It smells of salt and sea and sanguine wine. He feels cool waters lapping at his feet, taming the flames imprisoned in him.

“What? Me?”

His raised eyebrow is a paltry shield of jest. Stiles effortlessly counters with a raised eyebrow of his own and twinkling eyes.

“Oh, you’re worth _at least_ fifty grand, man. No small gift.”

Derek can’t help but laugh at that. That was how much Stiles, Scott and the others had frantically amassed to attempt to pay off the hunters who’d kidnapped him to Mexico. And when the hunters didn’t accept it and free him, they – a motley crew of teenagers who had no business getting involved in armed conflict – had laid their lives on the line just to save him.

No small gift, indeed.

He gazes into Stiles’ eyes yet again. He waits for Stiles to take the first step.

He waits. Braces himself for the breach.

But Stiles remains outside, as far from it as a forgotten god is from the hearts of mortal men. Stiles remains outside, because Derek hasn’t granted overt permission for entry. Because Stiles is respecting that.

The revelation is a devastating one to Derek. The tender smile Stiles bequeaths him, even more so.

“Derek.”

The Adam’s apple in Derek’s throat bobs once.

“Yeah?”

“C’mon, Big Guy. Tomorrow night. You and me. Let’s paint this town fucking red.”

Derek would have fulfilled that literally, if that’s what Stiles asks of him. With joy. Instead they prowl the streets of Manhattan shoulder to shoulder, two young creatures of different worlds ordained to run in the luminosity of the same moon, one on the cusp of formal adulthood and the other alit with the ecstasy of being with his mate. New York law forbids Stiles from alcohol for hours yet, but Stiles doesn’t give a damn about drinking. Stiles is already drunk on something else. Derek is drunk on him. On his uproarious laughter. His full-body grins. Every impulsive touch of those long, adroit fingers upon him.

Derek wonders what will happen if he kisses Stiles the minute Stiles turns twenty-one. If Stiles will reel back in dismay and stack impenetrable walls between them and burn what’s left of him away. If Stiles will reel back in surprise, and then kiss him back and cleanse them both in refreshing waves until the universe is reborn with them in celebration.

“I don’t want to forget, Derek,” Stiles says to him, as dawn begins to break over the Manhattan skyline and they trudge back to Stiles’ apartment. “I don’t want to forget.”

Derek doesn’t ask if Stiles is speaking about Malia. He doesn’t put his arm around Stiles’ shoulders like he aches to.

He doesn’t kiss Stiles. Not once.

The decisions plague him back in the newly restored Hale house. He shuffles down unfamiliar hallways bereft of smiling faces in picture frames. He stares into empty, noiseless rooms at blank, white walls. He smells drying paint and varnished wood and floor detergent and not his mother and father and siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts. He is an automaton that moves on a pre-programmed route for two specific, furnished rooms.

In this dream within a memory within a dream, he sees Stiles in what is now his private study, sitting haphazardly on the corner of a solid oak office desk and skimming through an intimidating collection of ancient tomes. Stiles is wearing one of his Henleys, a maroon one, and black sweatpants and gold-rimmed aviator spectacles. Light gray and white strands weave through Stiles’ brown hair like silver dragons sailing through the singed skies of a sunset.

“Hey, honey,” Stiles says, smiling at him. “Just lemme finish this last page and you’ll have me _all_ to yourself, I swear.”

Derek smiles back with crinkled eyes. No one will judge him here. He’s safe here, with Stiles.

“Is our monster of a kid finally asleep?”

Derek nods, because of course he and Stiles would have a child together in this house, this home, this _den_. Of course.

“ _Finally_ ,” Stiles replies with gusto. Then, adoringly, mellifluously, “Go on. I’ll be there soon.”

Derek’s feet move him on their own volition to the master bedroom. It’s minimalistic albeit luxurious, a configuration of polished metal and burnished wood, a harmonious blend of Stiles and himself. There, he strips and climbs into a king-sized bed smothered in pillows and blankets. He savors the high thread count-plushness of the blankets and sheets. He feels good. Great, even. He knows what Stiles needs and Stiles knows what he needs, and when Stiles gets here and joins him, he’ll show Stiles just how good he’s gotten at taking all of Stiles in him.

Stiles.

He snuggles into the pillows and blankets. He shuts his eyes. He hears the sound of a flowing stream. The rustling of leaves of verdant trees. He feels cool waters lapping at his feet, his shins. He feels someone watching him from the banks of the stream.

He opens his eyes.

He’s in his king-sized bed, taking up half of it. There are two pillows and his head is resting on one. He’s kicked the one blanket and one comforter down to his thighs, subjecting his uncovered upper body to early morning sunlight spilling in through uncurtained windows. He’s lying on his left side, facing the windows. His right hand is flat and spread on the bed sheet.

He stares at his right arm and hand in the sunlight. He stares at the cold, empty space that is the other half of the bed, imagining the warmth and vales of a pale, mole-spotted, lean body there.

He stares for a very long time at the five fingers of his hand.

 

 


End file.
